Kashmir

India's intifada

IT HAS been a dreadful week in Kashmir, the bloodiest yet in two decades of uprisings against Indian rule. The violence began with demonstrations against reports that Korans had been or would be desecrated by a small group of Christians in the United States. They quickly turned, as protests tend to in the Muslim-majority valley, to angrier cries for independence.

On September 13th protesters set fire to a Christian missionary school and 18 people were killed, most of them by police bullets. A curfew announced via loudspeakers mounted on police vehicles seemed to have little effect. Angry youths across the region gathered to hurl rocks and chant “Azadi!” (freedom!). Four more demonstrators were killed on September 15th.

As a sign of its growing alarm, the Indian government summoned an all-party emergency meeting that day in Delhi to discuss ways of ending the spiralling violence in the region. It has previously been accused of failing to take seriously the protests that have flared in Kashmir throughout the summer. Though the militancy that characterised the insurgency in the 1980s has been mostly suppressed, anti-government feeling is now expressed in street protests that are growing bloodier. In the past three months, police have killed at least 87 protesters, most of them teenage boys.

The most significant proposal raised at the government meeting was to withdraw the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a tough and deeply unpopular law that allows soldiers to search houses without warrants and shoot anyone suspected of being a separatist. The 20-year-old law, alongside the heavy presence of soldiers in India-administered Kashmir has fuelled a sense of injustice in the region's restive population. Lifting it is viewed by many as a necessary condition for peace.

And yet it is uncertain whether a repeal of the law would do anything to calm separatist leaders and their followers. A new poll, published at the weekend, found that most Kashmiris want full independence from India.